While bookstore shelves around the world have never ceased to display best-selling "life-and-letters" biographies in prominent positions, the genre became less popular among academic historians during the Cold War decades. Their main concern then was with political and socioeconomic structures, institutions, and organizations, or-more recently-with the daily lives of ordinary people and small communities. The contributors to this volume-all well known senior historians-offer self-critical reflections on problems they encountered when writing biographies themselves. Some of them also deal with topics specific to Central Europe, such as the challenges of writing about the lives of both victims and perpetrators. Although the volume concentrates on European historiography, its strong methodological and conceptual focus will be of great interest to non-European historians wrestling with the old "structure-versus-agency" question in their own work. Contributors: Volker R. Berghahn, Hartmut Berghoff, Hilary Earl, Jan Eckel, Willem Frijhoff, Ian Kershaw, Simone Lassig, Karl Heinrich Pohl, John C. G. Roehl, Angelika Schaser, Joachim Radkau, Cornelia Rauh-Kuhne, Mark Roseman, Christoph Strupp and Michael Wildt.

German unification evoked ambivalent reactions outside its borders: it revived disquietingmemories of attempts by German big business during the two world wars to build an economic empire in Europe in conjunction with the military and the government bureaucracy. But thereare also high hopes that German finance and industry will serve as the engine of reconstruction in eastern Europe, just as it played this role in the postwar unification of western Europe.

A comprehensive history of German society in this period, providing a broad survey of its development. The volume is thematically organized and designed to give easy access to the major topics and issues of the Bismarkian and Wilhelmine eras. The statistical appendix contains a wide range of social, economic and political data. Written with the English-speaking student in mind, this book is likely to become a widely used text for this period, incorporating as it does twenty years of further research on the German Empire since the appearance of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's classic work.

German unification evoked ambivalent reactions outside its borders: it revived disquietingmemories of attempts by German big business during the two world wars to build an economic empire in Europe in conjunction with the military and the government bureaucracy. But thereare also high hopes that German finance and industry will serve as the engine of reconstruction in eastern Europe, just as it played this role in the postwar unification of western Europe.

When the narrow majority of the British voted to leave the EU in a referendum in 2016, not only the citizens of neighbouring European countries shook their heads. Why did a nation believe in the age of international interdependence of its economy and politics that it could single-handedly achieve a renewed ascent into the circle of great powers by gaining national sovereignty? Volker Berghahn places Brexit in a long-term historical development, without which the traditions and emotions that surfaced in the heated debate of the last four years cannot be understood. It shows that the roots of Brexit lie in the two world wars triggered by Germany and the resulting economic and political decline of Great Britain in the 20th century.